A bawdy, non-politically correct comedy that wears its considerable chip on its shoulder with a certain unmitigated glee, Bad Santa may be one of the most one-note comedies of the year, but it’s also one of the funniest, packing three times as many laughs as Elf, a movie too timid to commit to anything beyond the notion of a set-piece. Written by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (Cats & Dogs) and directed by Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World, the documentary Crumb), Bad Santa is a film whose vulgar insolence is manifest from the start — there’s not so much an arc as a furiously maintained plateau — yet it’s also a strangely involving picture, akin to Michael Ritchie and Walter Matthau’s classic Bad News Bears in its annoyed and lecherous yet ultimately relatable humanity.

A deliciously irritable Billy Bob Thornton stars as Willie Stokes, a coarse, washed-up, boozed-up department store Santa Claus whose self-loathing has transformed into a general nastiness and truculence that oozes from every pore. He swears at kids, urinates in his pants and screams down mothers who try to approach him as he eats. The Santa gig is his con, though; together with his increasingly exasperated dwarf partner Marcus (Tony Cox), the two suffer Novembers and Decembers in humiliating costume in order to pull off Christmas Eve heists. It’s worked for eight years running, but when they settle in Phoenix, the doting attentions of a fat, picked-on kid (Brett Kelly, above right) drive Willie even further past distraction.

Those smitten with the softly rhythmic, oddball charms of Zwigoff’s first two films will be largely thrown by his work here; the film seems undertaken more as a curiosity or perhaps to settle a bet. It’s not that smooth most of the time, but it does share a rich and unflinching affinity for damaged characters with those earlier efforts. Zwigoff doesn’t insert any leavening winks, either, to try to let Thornton’s character off the hook, and let audiences know that they’re all in on the joke together.

In interviews, Thornton has described the movie as bringing to bear the sensibility of South Park upon the spirit of It’s a Wonderful Life, and he’s not far off really. Bad Santa is lewd, irresponsible and in its narrative longview perhaps not extremely well sketched. Yet its unrelenting nature, winning supporting players (the late John Ritter, Bernie Mac and Lauren Graham all guest, to bizarrely amusing effect) and consistently hilarious joke writing can’t help but win you over. It’s comedy outside the lines, and it’s absolutely wonderful — a twisted holiday movie for “the rest of us.” (Dimension, R, 93 minutes)

With Adam Sandler’s Funny People looming on the horizon, what better time to revisit the original tonal detour of the most consistently successful big screen comedian of his era, away from the juvenilia that made him wildly rich and famous and into the waiting bosom of a more skewed cinematic sensibility? Ergo, this dug-up review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, first published in Entertainment Today upon the movie’s original theatrical release in October, 2002. To wit:

It seemed, from the outset, one of the more bizarre film collaborations of recent memory, the unlikely pairing of budding auteur Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) and box office goofus Adam Sandler. Throw in the fact that Anderson wrote the warped romantic comedy specifically for Sandler — and his equally unlikely love interest, Emily Watson — and you seem to have all the ingredients of a classic, drunken, late night laff-pitch session, or at the very least a bet at the expense of some glassy-eyed studio executive. But Punch-Drunk Love won Anderson acclaim and Best Director honors at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and so with its Stateside bow we’re about to find out whether audiences like chocolate in their peanut butter, if you will — whether they’re willing to accept seemingly disparate, at-odds sensibilities for the sake of new, skewed pop art.

The reality is that the film has character and loads of differentiating style, but is also a mixed bag. Anderson uses David Phillips, the Universal of California civil engineer who in real life stumbled upon a frequent flyer promotion from Healthy Choice and then exploited the offer’s loophole, purchasing $3,000 worth of pudding and racking up 1.25 frequent flyer miles, as a loose jumping-off point. Phillips here becomes Barry Egan (Sandler), a quiet, put-upon small businessman with seven sisters who harp on his (many) shortcomings and quirks. Sporting throughout the film a slightly too-tight blue suit that makes him look like the bastard offspring of Austin Powers and Wiry-Haired, Uptight Smurf, Sandler’s Barry is, as a result of this heckling and other circumstances, a beaten of a human being, a textbook case of depression and self-isolation.

Things start to change when, through one of his sisters, he meets Lena Leonard (Watson). Matters are complicated, however, by the fact that just prior to their first date, Barry phoned a sex line, and now finds himself on the receiving end of a campaign of extortion and harassment perpetrated by the operator, Elizabeth (Mary Lynn Rajskub), and her scuzzy boss, Dean Trumbell (Philip Seymour Hoffman). There… is that cookie-cutter friendly enough for you?

A crooked nose of a character comedy, in both the best and worst sense of the phrase, Punch-Drunk Love is full of idiosyncrasies — the protracted phone sex call, with its litany of involved numbers and subsequent spiraling upwards (or downwards, depending on your point-of-view) out of control is particularly hilarious, both random and brilliantly interwoven. Yet it’s also this willful artistic bent — so dazzlingly, “appropriately” on display in Anderson’s two dramatic opuses of disaffected Los Angelenos — that to me bends and distorts the film’s purpose, meaning and clarity. I can appreciate the fact that Anderson wants to branch out, and no doubt saw this in some way as an opportunity to explore a new, much “lighter” genre; Punch-Drunk Love certainly seems his most facile and intuitive film to date. (Apart from its five principal characters, most of the rest of the roles are cast with non-actors.) Yet I’m not sure if Anderson’s methods always align with his final thematic intent; the film’s opening drags tremendously, and certain editorial choices — from simple narrative juxtaposition, cuts and Jon Brion’s far-too-intrusive score — do irrevocable harm.

Sometimes the film’s precious nattering leads to revelations both beautiful and cutting, as when a nervous Barry relates to Lena an utterly banal story about a disc jockey that concludes with, “DJ Justice, man… he cuts you down to size. I laugh and laugh, even when I’m alone.” Too often, however, we get fitful lurches drained of payoff, or even psychological incisiveness. I applaud wholeheartedly the film’s heart, verve and curiosity, and welcome wherever I can find them on the screen many of the qualities Punch-Drunk Love possesses in abundance. It just didn’t stick with me, on the whole. For most other film aficionados, an enjoyment of the quirky means here will easily match or counterbalance the end product. For more casual filmgoers, however, this, alas, won’t be the start of a beautiful new relationship. (Columbia, R, 95 minutes)

Ducking out for the weekend, but I’m seeding a couple entries in lieu of any groundbreaking commentary about the assload of money the newest Harry Potter flick continues to gross, including another pick-up from the way-back Internet archives — this 2002 review of one of the best-named documentaries of the past decade. Does not liking it make me a Nazi sympathizer, though? To wit:

It’s scary but also instructive to witness the way we deify our heroes and demonize and dehumanize our greatest villains. Less than six decades out, it’s quite easy to think of Adolf Hitler as a monster. But when you contemplate the human side of him — as the film Max, a portrait of Hitler’s post-World War I time as a struggling artist and young politico, at least attempted to do, with mixed results — the effect is often mind-boggling, if not downright surreal. Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary has a title that hits you over the head and demands your attention, if only because it makes you stop and weigh the absurd notion of someone taking dictation and chatting amiably with the 20th century’s most murderous, fanatically unhinged totalitarian.

If it’s hard to identify with the point-of-view being offered up here, this 85-minute documentary at least offers some fantastic firsthand insight. In the many years following World War II, Traudl Junge refused to discuss her story, spurning journalists who approached her for interviews and often denying — many times successfully — her role altogether. It was too taxing on her psyche, she explained, and she couldn’t understand “that young, stupid girl” she once was. Almost 60 years later, the octogenarian finally sat for a series of straightforward conversations, resulting in this collaborative project between filmmakers André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer. “I have finally let go of my story, and now I feel the world is letting go of me,” she says at one point, and indeed, Junge passed away one day after the film’s premiere at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival.

What we’re left with in Blind Spot, though, is a fascinating opportunity shoddily explored. Comprised of two interview sessions and shot in extreme close-up throughout, the film is static and shapeless; there’s little sense of continuity, and only occasionally do we get a snippet of a question, or any semblance of a shaping hand. So Junge continually professes her naiveté — not an unreasonable assertion, given that she was a provincial girl barely in her 20s when she started working for Hitler and, strangely enough, never even a member of the Nazi party — and offers anecdotal but hardly probing stories of how Hitler and the rest of his cadre, including Eva Braun, spent their time in underground German bunkers.

It’s here that you quickly realize Blind Spot isn’t a true documentary examination of its nominal subject’s infamous boss, or even Junge herself for that matter. Its complete lack of supporting or achived materials to give Junge’s memories a sense of either scope or specificity is egregious. The film — a monologue, really — might as well be a book or a magazine article, for it would serve exactly the same purpose, and likely fare much better in those mediums. What does emerge from Blind Spot, however, almost in spite of itself, is a sense of Hitler’s cracked twilight welfare. Scared, broken, depressed and paranoid (convinced the cyanide capsules given to him by a general were a part of an elaborate ruse of betrayal, he tested several on his dog, Blondie, who died and, in Junge’s words, left the bunker smelling like “bitter almonds”), Hitler had a pathological aversion to being taken alive.

And maybe that’s a good thing, knowing that Hitler was a big coward, and in his final weeks lived a desolate, darkly reflective existence, apprehending that virtually the entire world was closing in on him, and his grand schemes of a dominant motherland were now nothing more than pipe dreams. But take me at my word: you needn’t sit through Blind Spot to discover it for yourself. For once, in this instance, secondhand catharsis is just as good as the real thing. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG, 85 minutes)

I was trolling Internet archives looking for an old review to reference, link and fold into a new piece I’m writing, and instead of success in that measure I instead came across this piece I wrote on Baise Moi, a gritty French film that saw limited metropolitan release in 2002, as best I can determine from my records. Its own outlier status seemed a thematic fit with some of the discourse swirling around in a recent web chat I moderated on the shock value of Brüno, so I figured I’d throw up this theatrical-pegged review, originally penned during my editorial stint at Entertainment Today. To wit:

The easy hybrid pitch on Baise Moi, a graphic road romp of feminist empowerment, is that it’s sort of a French version of Thelma & Louise meets Natural Born Killers. This isn’t a bad composite sketch by any stretch of the imagination, but the full truth is, naturally, much more complicated. If you’re at all turned off by the aforementioned description, now might be a good time to go ahead and stop reading, because there’s no way to sugarcoat either this film or the unpleasant issues it addresses in any legitimate dissemination of it.



But if you’re not dissuaded by, in fact if you’re even curious about, the above categorization, then you may (read: may) be more inclined to submit yourself to Baise Moi, a ballsy and provocative thrill-kill import of uncommon brutality (the film’s translation is Rape Me, a verb you probably didn’t conjugate much in high school French) that serves as a launching off point for a whole series of questions regarding men and women and sex and violence.

Early in the film, porn actress Manu (Rafaella Anderson, above left, given to wisenheimer chesire grins of eerily repressed malevolence) is violently and graphically sexually assaulted by two random thugs. But she casually dismisses both the attack and her attackers. “I leave nothing precious in my cunt for those jerks,” spits Manu to her fellow victim. Meanwhile, Nadine (Karen Lancaume, billed as Karen Bach, and summoning visions of an older Katie Holmes cast as a strung-out rocker) finds herself wrapped up in a sort of Southern Baptist triathlon of sin, spending most of her time smoking dope (or looking for it), masturbating and swapping sex for cash. United by chance, the two grrrrrrls, like combustible chemical agents brought together in a lab study gone wrong, ignite the subdued rage in one another, and embark on a twisted road trip of rapacious retribution, screwing men, robbing women and killing both.

Co-written and directed by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi (a former prostitute turned bestselling novelist and a one-time porn actress, respectively — though don’t let those descriptors impugn their credibility), Baise Moi means to willfully shock, and does. To actually see the degrading violence of a (staged, but unforgiving) rape is both sickening — exactly what it’s meant to be — and oddly… instructive? I don’t doubt for a second that if more people saw this harrowing scene (and others like it) instead of many of the flippant, inconsequential and otherwise candy-ass Hollywood representations of rape, from Showgirls to countless lame movies-of-the-week, sexual assault would decrease nationwide.

Coarse, roughhewn and rather unsophisticated, cinematically speaking, Baise Moi nonetheless succeeds largely on its gritty realism. It’s the ultimate deconstruction of a road movie (in one scene Manu and Nadine fret over the dearth of quality wisecracks with which they dispense victims), overcharged with a certain new wave abandon and coursing with a techno-fed, “Smack My Bitch Up” bravado. Still, the denouement of all this mayhem — both the literal ending and the third act as a whole, which finds the duo, on the run from police, relaxing briefly at a stranger’s house — seems a little contrived.

There’s no denying that Baise Moi is powerful, a cinematic jab to the solar plexus. To merely dismiss it as violent and depraved is to ignore the thought and philosophy behind the explicitness, the film’s true raison d’étre, if you will. But at just under 80 minutes, Baise Moi is a bit too truncated to fully address either the complexity of the quick-catch relationship between Manu and Nadine or the various larger questions of subjugated female sexuality that its narrative raises.(Remstar/FilmFixx, unrated, 77 minutes)

In anticipation of the forthcoming birthday of star Paz Vega, I’m re-posting this review of writer-director Julio Medem’s Sex and Lucia, originally published in Entertainment Today upon its Stateside release in the summer of 2002. Visually rich, stylistically bold and erotically charged, Sex and Lucia is a cinematic disquisition on desire, sex, fear and the secrets that the intertwining of the three cause us to keep.

The winner of several Goya Awards — the Oscar equivalent — in its native Spain, Sex and Lucia uses waitress and free spirit Lucia (feted Best Actress winner Vega, above) as chief conduit for its narrative, even though in fact the story is probably filtered to a slightly larger degree through her writer boyfriend Lorenzo (Tristan Ulloa, looking like a sort of vagabond Gary Sinese). After a distraught Lorenzo leaves her, Lucia too takes flight, seeking refuge on a quiet Mediterranean island of special significance, an island where she soon discovers some dark secrets regarding her relationship.

We quickly flash back six years, and see Lorenzo’s fiery one-night fling with a mysterious stranger, Elena (Najwa Nimri), that forms the thinly veiled spine of his autobiographical first novel. Ironically, it’s also the unbridled passion in this book that woos Lucia; we witness their first encounter, in which she takes a winged chance and declares her love in a cafe. Moved by her honesty and bravery, and seemingly nonplussed by the fact that she’s been stalking him, Lorenzo welcomes Lucia with open arms, and  the two immediately become a couple.

Some years pass, but consequence comes knocking when Lorenzo, through his agent, finds out that Elena — whose name he never learned — not only became pregnant but also bore him a daughter, now 4 years old. Consumed with guilt and driven by a sweaty, despairing uncertainty, Lorenzo pours his tortured ambivalence into another thinly veiled tome, his third (this after his second effort, an upbeat book, didn’t register with Lucia). He keeps things a secret from Lucia even as he passively tumbles into an “inappropriate relationship” with his daughter’s babysitter, Belen (the beguiling Elena Anaya), a relationship that allows him access to his little girl, named Luna, without giving away his complete identity. More tragedy soon follows, however, leading us back to Lorenzo’s flight from the beginning of the film.

As the title might suggest, Sex and Lucia conveys in powerful strokes both bold and understated the potential consuming nature of raw sexual hunger; as usual, the Europeans get it right while we Americans continue to by and large wallow in shallow titillation. The film never for an instant feels lurid or ridiculous, even though some of the couplings are desperate and/or needy. The imagery of nature also plays a central role in Sex and Lucia‘s narrative (the sun and the moon are recurrent symbols), both on the surface and as an emotional/visual parallel to the characters’ arcs. Certain anglings and tactics of Medem (Lovers of the Arctic Circle), though, reek of both cheap male fantasy (the notion of writer as hardy sex god always screams surrogate screen presence) and writerly overreach when such obfuscation and complication are hardly necessary.

Characterized by a typical European ellipticism, the film is, technically and visually speaking, a marvel, but structurally something of a mess; Medem’s playful linear jumps and interstitial non-sequiturs are more often a hindrance than the dreamy incorporations they’re meant to be taken as. Still, forgiven these minor indulgences and occasional waywardness Sex and Lucia achieves an eerie hold entirely independent of its story proper, and maybe that’s part of Medem’s point. (Palm, R, 128 minutes)

In anticipation of the November 16 release of the seemingly somewhat similar Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, from Stranger Than Fiction writer Zach Helm, I thought I’d re-post this review of Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, originally published upon its release in 2005. To wit:

In the wake of the death of his semi-estranged father
several years ago, as well as the birth of his own child, director Tim Burton
has had fatherhood on his mind quite a lot. For a filmmaker sometimes accused
of crafting pretty, idiosyncratic but emotionally distant baubles, it has
infused his work with a newfound directness. His most recent previous film, Big Fish, told the
story of a young man trying to come to terms with his tall-tale-telling paterfamilias, and
now, re-teaming with Big Fish
scribe John August, Burton delivers his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
recasting the movie again in a fantastical format as a sugarcoated parable of
familial bliss and dislocation. Colorful and anchored by another quirky star
turn from Burton’s go-to leading man, Johnny Depp, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
is a sort of adult-leaning kids’ movie, but one that also feels hermetically
sealed and a bit predetermined, if always still energetic.

Finding Neverland costar as
Charlie Bucket, a kind and earnest young boy who lives with his parents (Helena
Bonham Carter and Noah Taylor) and extended nuclear family, including Grandpa
Joe (Waking Ned Devine’s
David Kelly), in a lopsided abode in the shadow of reclusive confectioner Willy
Wonka’s towering sweets factory. For years the candy plant has been closed to
the outside world, the result of Wonka’s frustration with corporate spies out
to steal his secret recipes and ideas. One day, though, Wonka sends word that
hidden in his chocolate bars worldwide are five special, golden tickets to
visit his factory.

Pandemonium ensues, and one by one the young
winners come forward, including gluttonous Augustus Gloop (Philip Wiegratz);
bossy, competitive Violet Beauregarde (Annasophia Robb); bratty,
videogame-obsessed Mike Teavee (Jordan Fry); and over-privileged daddy’s girl
Veruca Salt (Julia Winter). Against considerable odds, poor Charlie secures the
final ticket, and sets out for his one-of-a-kind visit with Grandpa Joe, who
used to work at Wonka’s factory.

Once there, the eccentric Wonka gives his guests a
tour of his whimsical warehouse, which includes an entirely edible landscape
with a chocolate waterfall, grassy overpass and candy-apple trees. All of this
insanity is tended to by the diminutive, mischievous Oompa Loompas (all played
by a 4-foot, 4-inch guy named… Deep Roy),
loyal workers whom Wonka pays in cocoa beans. As the other children one by one
befall unfortunate accidents, Charlie moves closer to claiming the special
end-of-visit surprise promised as part of the tour.

Depp’s slightly fey performance as the germophobic
Wonka is a thing of crazy-quilt beauty, made all the more indelible by his Prince
Valiant bob and James Caan bathrobe (he has a nervous giggle, too, reminiscent
of Vince Vaughn). Burton also peppers the film with referential tips of the
tophat to many of his past movies, from Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood to Mars
Attacks! and Planet
of the Apes. But the movie feels like a bit of a put-on. Though
beautifully, painstakingly designed, several passages drag, and glimpses back
into Wonka’s fractured adolescent relationship with his father don’t carry
enough emotional heft to make them seem relevant to the here and now. The
movie’s musical Oompa Loompa numbers, meanwhile, come across as sludgy and
poorly mixed.

Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory forestalls if not eradicates entirely the memory of
Gene Wilder’s 1971 turn as Wonka — your mind doesn’t tend to be elsewhere
during a Tim Burton movie — but also comes across as perhaps nothing more than
a lively curio. An expensive sweet, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has the capacity to
delight, but it also, for all its authorial authenticity, feels somewhat
isolated. (Warner Bros., PG, 118 mins.)

Stuffing the archives is a slow and sometimes seemingly pointless task, but with Evan Rachel Wood‘s birthday and her new film, King of California, both looming, it seemed the right time for this re-posted review of Pretty Persuasion, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2005. To wit:

Director Marcos Siega’s Pretty
Persuasion has a streak of originality a mile long and about an
inch deep. A sort of forked-tongue, high school mash-up of Clueless and To Die
For, with the respective if disparate quality of each of those films
canceling each other out in a tidal wave of tangy smirk, it serves as a
bracing, in-your-face reminder that creativity and quality need not be mutually
exclusive.

Thirteen‘s
Evan Rachel Wood, above left), a self-involved and casually cruel diva-in-training given to
proclamations like, “I’m tolerant of all races, but I’m glad I was born white.”
The daughter of a successful but zonked and anti-Semitic businessman (James
Woods, chewing scenery in a frequently open bathrobe) with an equally out-there
new trophy wife (Jaime King), Kimberly attends Roxbury High School, an elite
Beverly Hills private institution, and it’s no surprise given her surroundings
and preternatural maturity and influence that she wants to be an actress — or,
more to the point, a celebrity. Orbiting around Kimberly are two satellites,
her dim best friend Brittany Wells (Elizabeth Harnois, above right) and naïve newcomer Randa
Azzouni (Adi Schnall, above center), an Arab girl whom Kimberly takes under her wing with a
doting sanctimoniousness.

To advance her popular agenda, Kimberly hatches a
plot to frame their nebbishy English instructor, Percy Anderson (Ron
Livingston), for sexual molestation. As the accusation moves toward trial, the
scheme ensnares local lesbian reporter Emily Klein (Jane Krakowski) and
Brittany’s boyfriend Troy (Stark Sands) in an expanding daisy chain of
blackmail, double-crosses and back-biting (large portions of the third act seem
nipped from Wild Things).

The young Wood’s work as Kimberly is undeniably the
stuff of a major talent, but it comes in the service of empty vehicle of
flattened emotional affect. Director Siega cut his teeth on music videos and
Miramax’s Underclassman,
but never elevates Pretty
Persuasion to anything more than the sum of its arch,
self-satisfied parts. (Incidentally, the music, by Gilad Benamram, is a
straight-up rip-off of Angelo Badalamenti’s work on Twin Peaks.)

This may not always be Siega’s fault. Skander
Halim’s script is a real mouthful; at times delightfully bitchy, it touches on
a wide swath of hot-button issues and topics, and like, say, Donnie Darko, hearteningly
shows the cruel underbelly of adolescent life in a way that mainstream studio
films do not, and also the way that teens craftily exploit one another’s
obliviousness. Any and all sort of relation to the outside world, though, rings
false and willfully strident. The movie likes to “shock” with lewd and
politically incorrect off-the-cuff remarks, 15-year-old Kimberly’s sexual favor
brokering and a scene with Woods diddling himself.

The problem is that this none of this ever comes
across as anything more than superficial. That would be fine were Pretty Persuasion a much
broader comedy. But the movie flails, rowdily and flagrantly, in its efforts to
infuse drama into the proceedings, and by the time a death occurs and
ostensibly genuine tears are shed during the third act, one can barely stand to watch. (Samuel Goldwyn/Roadside Attractions, R, 110 mins.)

Well, it’s a quarter ’til one in the morning and I just heard some strange noise outside, so it seems as good a time as any to re-post a review of the recent remake of The Amityville Horror, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2005 by a now-defunct (and deservedly so) publication. To wit:

The curtains billow early and often in The Amityville Horror, a self-serious
fright flick, full of all the familiar genre touchstones, that tries to play up
a classy, non-fiction pedigree, but ironically comes off as more dunderheaded
and wildly implausible than any number of slapdash, generic horror siblings. A
nastily forceful and artless rehash of movies both much better (The Shining) and just as bad (Hide and Seek), The Amityville Horror is a remake of the 1979 film starring James
Brolin and Margot Kidder, and based on a true story — “the true story” the title card trumpets (like it’s a friggin’
chronicling of the Revolutionary War or something). It jabs at the audience
insistently from the get-go, mixing earsplitting sound design and ghoulish and
gory visual smash-cuts picked up off the cutting room floors of various Nine
Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson music videos.

The film is set in 1975 in the Deer
Park suburbs of Long Island.
Contractor George Lutz (a buff, bearded Ryan Reynolds) has found love with
Kathy (Melissa George), and with her comes a ready-made family consisting of
three kids — surly pre-teen Billy, young daughter Chelsea and little,
perpetually dewy-eyed Michael — since Kathy’s first husband has passed away.
When they find an expansive fix-’er-upper on the edge of town for a song, they
wonder what the catch is. Come to find out that in the house scruffy, bearded
Ronald DeFeo shotgunned to death six family members — his parents and four
siblings — in their sleep, supposedly under instruction from demons. Never ones
to pass up a deal, however, the Lutz clan rolls the die (wink, wink) and moves
in anyway. Bad idea… George’s grasp on reality becomes more and more tenuous
(as evidenced by Reynolds’ bloodshot contacts), and he starts hearing messages
to kill his family. Chelsea, meanwhile, falls under the dangerous sway of dead
little Jodie DeFeo, for some reason not stopping to ask her about the bullet
hole in her head.

The concept of horror on display in The Amityville Horror is a loose one, applied arbitrarily to
whatever works in the moment, be it a vaguely anthropomorphized house,
apparitions of rotting-faced dead girls or bloody, tortured visages and ripped
open ribcages. Mostly, though, it merely means sound effects editors paid by
the decibel. Scott Kosar’s script never manages to rise too far above
preposterousness, be it in big scenes (separate scenes of confrontation for the
children when Rachel Nichols’ pin-up stoner babysitter meets an unfortunate
fate) or small (a ridiculous expository microfiche headline, “DeFeo kills
family after 28 days,” meant to give parallel urgency to the current
proceedings).

Meanwhile, director Andrew Douglas — yet another esteemed
commercial veteran making his feature debut — doesn’t have the requisite dark,
foreboding flair to match The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre remake, another Kosar adaptation exec-produced by Michael
Bay. The result is a movie with game efforts from Reynolds and George, and a
few early effective passages, but one whose finale is so stupid as to
completely erase any trace remembrances of tangible emotional consequences. The
only lasting horror in The Amityville
Horror is in what it takes from your wallet. (MGM/Dimension, R, 83
minutes)

With Good Luck Chuck just around the bend, and making such a desperately naked play to position itself as the next Wedding Crashers, I figured it’s time to re-post a slightly redacted version of that film’s original review, originally published in Screen International upon its theatrical release in 2005. To wit:

Jim Carrey remaining devoted to counterbalancing
comedic broadsides with dramatic forays, Hollywood has been in serious need of
a bankable humor infusion. They can call off the search. It’s Vaughn and Wilson who
headline Wedding Crashers, and the
pair deliver a bada-bing smash. A charismatic and indefatigable romp that
strikes just the right balance between well-sketched rudeness and sweetness,
the movie stands poised to dominate the summer comedy sweepstakes.

The story centers on John Beckwith (Wilson)
and Jeremy Grey (Vaughn), two Washington D.C.
divorce mediators who get their off-time kicks posing as brothers or friends
and hopping from nuptial to nuptial. There, they enjoy the free catering,
alcohol and, naturally, love-hungry single women, sweeping the latter off their
feet and into bed. Things change when the guys crash the marriage ceremony of
the oldest daughter of Secretary of the Treasury William Cleary (Christopher
Walken). John falls hard, fast and sincere for youngest daughter Claire (Rachel
McAdams), leaving Jeremy to cope with the amorous advances of Gloria (Isla Fisher), an unleashed stallion of sexual rapaciousness and serial nuttiness. John’s
would-be relationship with Claire is complicated by several obstacles, not the
least of which is of course his phony identity. There’s also Claire’s preppy
jock boyfriend, Sack Lodge (Bradley Cooper).

Writers Steve Faber and Bob Fisher devise a number of clever
ways to extend the joke of Wedding
Crashers beyond the mere hit-and-run pleasures their characters derive,
from having John and Jeremy bet on quoted scripture and ceremonial music (Johan
Pachelbel’s Canon in D, Richard Wagner’s Wedding March Processional, etc.) to
having them bound together by a leave-no-crasher-behind credo with all sorts of
other rider attachments that eventually leads to a cameo by fellow Frat Pack
member Ferrell as Chazz, the sort of mystical patriarch of this culture of
uninvited party-hopping. The writers are careful, too, to paint John and Jeremy as
impish advantage-takers who have a perhaps misguided but nonetheless abiding
love of weddings (and thus romance). This may seem on the surface like
bet-hedging, but it actually works better since the duo’s prevarications are
neither outlandish nor over-the-top. There are real characters here, and the
laughs come from the absurd over-commitment to them, as well as some solid joke
writing.

Director David Dobkin does a very good job of blending the
film’s disparate comedic styles, and while Wedding Crashers generally oversells
the smarmy loathsomeness of Sack (making sure to paint him as a philandering
letch so as not to retain any possible vestige of audience sympathy), the
Cleary clan — a nice admixture of Kennedy and Bush lore and speculation — provides a suitably rich backdrop against which John and Jeremy can spin their
wheels. The cast all have a blast and, again, Wilson and Vaughn
deliver fashionably winning performances. But it’s Fisher who achieves breakout
clarity with her portrayal of the borderline bipolar Gloria. In a world of
demure or artificially amusing straightwomen, she’s not afraid to play
gleefully unhinged. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (New Line, R, 113 minutes)

As I’ve mentioned before, the archives here at Shared Darkness will soon swell with past legit reviews and other material. Right now I feel disgusting and disgusted from stuffing my face for lunch (though not a hamburger, mind you), so up goes this review of Morgan Spurlock’s superlative documentary Super Size Me, originally published upon its release in 2004. To wit:

30 days; 2) he must eat three square meals a day, no excuses; 3) he must try everything on the menu at least once; and 4) he will “super size” his meal only, but always, when asked. The only other limitation Spurlock imposes is one of limited physical activity, meaning no formal exercise and only the average amount of American walking per day (a handy pedometer counts the paces).

The results are — for anyone who’s ever gorged themselves into a saturated fat coma rushing between commitments, and that would be all of us — equally astounding and completely unsurprising. Spurlock’s cholesterol jumps 65 points, he gains roughly 25 pounds and his body fat index swells from around 11 to 18 percent. Only a few weeks in, he’s stricken with vague, recurring chest pains, and advised by a doctor at one point that the damage he is doing to his liver is akin to that of an alcoholic who is on the way to drinking themselves to death.

It’s not all mindless gorging, though. In fact, the film isn’t mindless at all. Spurlock’s month-long binge is supplemented with insightful, eye-opening interviews with top medical and health professionals, including former Surgeon General David Satcher, George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf, author and ice cream heir John Robbins, members of the NYU School of Nutrition and more. On the surface, the inspiration behind Spurlock’s idea for the film — two teenage girls suing McDonald’s for making them overweight — is preposterous, a big, fat (pun intended), shining example of everything that makes average, ordinary Americans so cynical about our judicial system. Yet by the time the movie makes the point that children are bombarded with an estimated 10,000 views of food-related ads per year, around 95 percent of which are for candy, sugary cereals, soda and fast food, you come around to the notion that no amount of sensible parenting alone can counter these media images and that while perhaps not legally culpable, there’s an ethical/social obligation on the part of the fast food industry to level the playing field and help provide healthier choices and more information to the public than they are collectively contributing right now.

As a screen presence, Spurlock has an easygoing, immediately charming demeanor, and his film — which chides rather than scolds, energizes and incites more than nakedly provokes — benefits tremendously from this. Super Size Me is a rare breed — one of only a handful of select films that I can recall as being as important as it is entertaining. If you still haven’t seen it, make it part of your cinematic diet, and quickly. Just make sure you’ve eaten healthy beforehand. (Samuel Goldwyn/Roadside Attractions, PG-13, 100 minutes)

War is still making headlines, of course, and with Richard Shepard’s quite excellent The Hunting Party looming on the horizon (more on this soon), I thought I’d re-post this review of 2001’s No Man’s Land. To wit:

Writer-director Danis Tanovic’s film opens with a group of Bosnian soldiers, ostensibly on a relief mission, lost in a thick, soupy battlefield fog. It’s an apt visual metaphor for No Man’s Land, a well-acted, thoughtfully constructed tragicomic exploration of just how murky all-consuming hate can be, even among starkly pronounced enemies.

Set in 1993 during the height of the Bosnian civil war, No Man’s Land takes its title from where its lead characters find themselves trapped. When the aforementioned fog dissipates and the Serbs open fire, reneging on a tentative peace accord, a T-shirt-clad fighter named Ciki (Branko Djuric) survives and manages to make his way to an abandoned ditch in between the two entrenched fronts. When the Serbian commander sends two of his soldiers to check the trench, Ciki hides and they find nothing. Before they leave, the duo set a booby trap, laying one of the dead Bosnian soldiers on a spring mine so that when his comrades find his body and move it, they too will be killed. As they finish the job, they notice that an abandoned rifle there minutes before is now missing; someone is in the trench with them. Cornered, Ciki springs from his hiding place, killing one of the Serb soldiers and wounding the other, a shiny-pated rookie named Nino (Rene Bitorajac). Rather than finish Nino off, however, Ciki spares him, figuring he may be a useful bargaining tool.

Adrien Brody), frustrated by the stultifying inaction of his United Nations superiors, who include the rather obviously named Colonel Soft (Four Weddings and a Funeral’s Simon Callow).

Much more than just an absurdist predicament, No Man’s Land manages to pull moments both light (the soldiers call the UN peacekeepers “smurfs” because of their light blue helmets) and grim — as well as always human — from its set-up. Ciki and Nino’s arguments are at first very straightforward and didactic, but as the film moves away from speechifying and into more illustrative examples of their (assumed) differences, it really gathers steam.

Plenty of films of this type, in which two mortal enemies are confined to specific quarters, have rosy and/or oversimplified worldviews that usually translate into cloying, pat resolutions. If everyone would just get together and talk, really get to know the so-called enemy, these optimistic films tell us, then things would be better, everyone would see how similar we really are to our neighbor. The small but crowning victory of No Man’s Land, Bosnia’s official entry for the foreign language Academy Award, is that while Ciki and Nino forge an uneasy alliance for joint benefit, they never fully trust one another, they never give in to the absurdity of their situation. Yet No Man’s Land isn’t darkly pessimistic by any stretch (indeed, an opening exchange defines the difference between pessimists and optimists as being that the first always thinks things could be worse, while the latter knows they can be). It’s simply steeped in a recognizable vanity and humanity largely lacking in many pictures of its ilk — qualities that lend the film an inordinate amount of gravity. To purchase the film on DVD via Amazon, click here. (United Artists, R, 97 minutes)

Given that it’s currently all things Steve Carell, what with the release of Evan Almighty, I really should have re-posted this review of The 40-Year-Old Virgin much earlier. Oh well, here goes, redacted from its original publication on occasion of the film’s release in August of 2005, by an outlet that still owes me (and many others) money, an outlet that may or may not be named Now Playing Magazine, formerly published by Douglas Brisotti. To wit:



Given the rich tradition of comedies of humiliation, it’s hard to believe that until The 40-Year-Old Virgin there hasn’t been a major Hollywood laugher set around the romantic fumblings and flailing of an adult virgin. (I guess this says something about where the line of degradation exists for actors, or perhaps more accurately men in general.) Given Hollywood‘s penchant for smooth edges, then, it’s also surprising that the collaboration between writer-actor Steve Carell and writer-director Judd Apatow still retains such a shaggy, idiosyncratic appeal. Coming closely on the heels of Wedding Crashers‘ R-rated success, The 40-Year-Old Virgin seems to augur a potential return to more delightfully unrestrained but not insistently vulgar adult comedy.

Carell stars as Andy Stitzer, an all-around nice guy who works at an electronics store in the San Fernando Valley, content with his bicycle for transportation and his vast assortment of videogames and mint-in-box collectibles for entertainment. Andy’s lack of success with women has calcified into a complete lack of amorous effort. When Andy gets sucked into a poker game with three co-workers — David (Paul Rudd), Jay (Romany Malco) and Cal (Seth Rogen) — and subsequently “outed,” however, his life takes a big turn. His newfound friends are adamant that they play a part in his “de-virginization,” and so they bombard Andy with advice and push him into interactions with the opposite sex, a string of women who include a drunken, bipolar speed-dater (Leslie Mann, Apatow’s real-life wife) and a nearby bookshop employee, Beth (Elizabeth Banks), enamored with Andy’s spookily casual indifference. (He’s instructed by Cal, hilariously, to “act like David Caruso from Jade.”)

Andy’s dilemma isn’t merely some misogynistic quest, though, as he meets Trish (Catherine Keener), a divorcée and single mother (and grandmother, though there’s thankfully no baby involved), and finds himself falling for her even as Jay and Cal insist that he needs some “starter nookie.” As he wins Trish over, Andy must slowly come to grips with how to break his secret to her.

Not particularly surprisingly, the film feels very episodic and bears the marks of test audience-tinkering. Certain scenes, such as one involving a transvestite prostitute (accidentally) hired by one of Andy’s friends, are over before they even begin, and other sequences — including a bit where Andy gets locked in the showroom with nothing but porn playing around him on all the big-screen TVs, and a scene of self-gratification set to Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” — seem definitely trimmed with an eye toward propriety. That may seem strange for a comedy to all outward appearances bawdy as all get-out, but The 40-Year-Old Virgin is essentially a relationship comedy masquerading as a sex farce.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing (think of the diminishing return of Stifler and the grandmother in the dreadful, forced American Wedding). The 40-Year-Old Virgin creates palpably human characters (Rudd, Rogen and Malco are all a treat) and grows the comedy from there. If the film cycles through jokes and scenarios at a clip that’s both inspiring and sometimes frustrating (because it doesn’t fully exploit certain set-ups to their logical conclusion), you at least appreciate its groundedness. Apatow (Freaks and Geeks) proves himself as suited for the big screen as the small, and Carell, taking a cue from Ben Stiller’s propensity for comedic debasement, launches himself into his role with a complete lack of ego; the much-trailered chest wax scene is 100 percent authentic, and achieves a sort of flippant Zen brilliance even though you know what’s coming. (Universal, R, 116 minutes)